No.One’s Delta Sneaker Doesn’t Want You to Know It’s Handmade

A funny thing started happening recently at the Venice, California, studios of No.One, Mark Gainor’s upstart handmade sneaker brand. Friends, Gainor explains, would drop by and see a shoe he and his team were developing—the Delta, an ’80s-inspired trainer—and offer a strange sort of compliment. “People picked it up like, ‘Wow, this is really nice. This looks like a real shoe,’ ” Gainor tells me over the phone. He wasn’t offended; instead, he understood that they were picking up on a subtle change. Since launching in early 2017, No.One made its name by applying traditional cobbling techniques to the world of sneakers, turning out one painstakingly handmade pair at a time. With the Delta, though, they were after something different.

“When they say real shoe,” Gainor says, “I assume that they mean that this looks like a mass-produced sneaker. Which brings up that point of, Is this a good thing, or is this a bad thing? That's kind of the line that we're dancing on, because each Delta takes three weeks to make.”

In a sneaker landscape as dense and genre-spanning as it’s ever been, that’s certainly one way to stand out: by spending tons of time and effort to...hide all that time and effort.

Gainor explains the project like this: “Our premise is that we hand-make very small runs of sneakers here in Venice, California. We've got five shoemakers who work every day, a lot of R&D, and then production—the full production and development of every shoe we make is made inside of our little studio here in Venice.” This is, to put it mildly, unique: “I don't know anyone who's making sneakers the way that we're making them,” he continues. “They're all hand-lasted, hand-cut, very much made the same way that a pair of John Lobb bespoke shoes would be. Which kind of opens a strange kind of paradox of obscuring the craft, or at least presenting it in a manner where the immediate and proper assumption would be that machines have made this object.”

For a while, No.One was selling numbered editions—severely limited runs of a given silhouette. “The problem with that, of course, is that we end up making one size nine, or two size nines,” Gainor says. So they’ve ramped things up: “We've got this permanent collection now of four models that are available to be purchased through the website now, and the response has been great.” Interestingly enough, having ready-to-cop versions hasn’t depressed the brand’s bespoke sales—in fact, it’s done the opposite. If a customer can get a taste of No.One off the shelf—feel the uncommon heft, ultra-luxe materials, and rock-solid construction—they’re going to be that much more likely to plunk down for a custom job. (Not that the off-the-rack version is cheap, exactly: A new pair of Deltas will run you $725.)

About that construction: The Delta is a goddamn velvet tank, hefty and butter-soft in equal measure. “The inspiration is drawn from early-'80s athletic sneakers,” Gainor says. “They're kind of the first-wave pre–[Nike] Air Max, and the running shoe, obviously, in the early stages of aerobics or whatnot." The references are clear: One dash of Reebok, a touch of skate shoe, a little bit of Kanye's "Calabasas" Yeezy Powerphase sneaker. But for Gainor, the design isn't quite as important as what the references mean. "It was the first time that sneakers kind of crossed the line into popular culture, into a mass-market product,” he says. The joke, of course, is that Gainor’s are as far from mass-market as possible. “It's probably the least efficient way that you could make a shoe,” he says.

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For Gainor, the most significant piece is the hand-lasted build: “We take the sewn upper, and when we pull it and form it around the last”—the foot form around which every pair of shoes is built—“it really goes from being a two-dimensional flat pattern, and it becomes alive,” he says. “It picks up the dimension in the form of the last, or the foot, and it becomes a sneaker.” But the stuff getting the hand-lasting treatment is notable, too: No.One contracts with the same supplier that gets leather to certain high-fashion French houses, and grabs Gainor’s favorite full-grain baby bull, which means that the Delta is as compulsively touchable as any sneaker on the market. This being 2018, the usually quiet No.One decided to add a hit of branding. As you might expect, they do this in a not exactly traditional way. “One of the technologies we're able to employ is brand-new UV printing,” Gainor explains. “This is way too geeky for anyone to care about, but we're able to print six-point type incredibly clear on the full-grain leather. In terms of a literal marriage of craft and technology, I get excited about hand-tanned baby bison from France getting high-fidelity UV print on it.”

There are worse ways to sum up the Delta, and the No.One project generally. This is how Gainor likes to do things—even if it doesn’t always make sense to his colleagues. “We actually have a new gentleman who just joined us this week,” Gainor says, laughing. “He came over from Louis Vuitton, so I've been onboarding him this week and walking him through things, and every day I just have to hold his hand at the horrors of inefficiencies that we have.” In a sneaker world where it’s harder than ever to stand out, scaring the pants off luxury-fashion alumni might be the perfect lane to carve out.

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